The girls played on the road against Windom Area on Tuesday night, and lost 61-52.

It was a tight game in the first half as the Saints trailed at the halfway mark by two 26-24.

Windom opened a large lead in the second half. They were up by 15 points with four minutes to go, but the Saints went on a run to close the final margin to nine.

Freshman Julia Beckius was the leading scorer with 18. Other Saints in double figures were Emily Hurley and Brenda Crevantes with 11.

As she has had many times this year Hurley had a double double when she snared 14 rebounds - half of the team’s 28 boards.

Shooting remains a challenge for the girls. The team shot 22 of 67 from the floor and they were only 4 of 13 from the free throw line.

Head Coach Adam Schroeder said, “We lost by nine but played pretty well.

“Julia played very well and most of her points came off of her seven steals. We are starting to play a little better, we just need to work on some sort of offensive flow and continue to be aggressive on the boards. We will have a tough task against a big, and physical St. Peter team.”

BEA 51, SJA 32

The SJA girls basketball team dropped home game to the visiting BEA Buccaneers 51 to 32 last Friday night.

If the young Saints could bottle up how they played in the first ten minutes of the game and played that way every minute, they’d probably go unbeaten the rest of the year.

The girls exploded out to a 23-8 lead over BEA, but the visitors then went on a 22-0 run to close out the first half, which gave the visitors a halftime lead of 30-23.

In the opening nine plus minutes of the game the Saints were firing on all cylinders. Just about all of the shots the girls threw up touched the bottom of the net. They got stops, rebounds, and forced turnovers.

The taller and more experienced Bucs coughed up the ball three times in the first two minutes and the Saints converted on the other end of the court.

SJA spurted out to an 8-0 lead with a few ticks more than two minutes gone in the game, prompting BEA Head Coach Al Cue to call a time out to stem the Saints opening run.

Page 2 of 3 - That run saw the Saints knock down a pair of treys and Devon Flohrs scored a layup off of one of those early steals.

The Saints put light pressure on BEA as they took the ball up the court and that seemed to bother the Bucs early on. SJA also did a better job of not being bothered by BEA’s pressure in the early part of the game.

When SJA’s Brenda Cervantes dropped in a pair of free throws with 8:44 left in the first half the girls had their biggest lead at 23-8.

Free throw opportunities were few and far between for the Saints in the first half as BEA had two fouls called against them while the Saints had 12 fouls called against them.

With the Saints leading 23-21 SJA’s Aryn Eckstrom took a shot from the corner and was badly hacked with the ball flying out to the middle of the free throw lane (see this video on our website). A foul was not called on BEA.

This so infuriated the Saints Head Coach Adam Schroeder that he was called for a technical. Coach Schroeder is generally a mild mannered guy.

BEA made the two technical FTs and got a bucket on the inbound play. In this critical stretch where BEA took over the lead, they made five free throws plus the bucket after the technical.

This gave the visitors a 28-23 lead and another two pointer for BEA closed out the first half scoring.

The foul calls were definitely going against the Saints, as the Saints had 19 fouls called on them while BEA had only seven called on them. At the same time, some of the other trends that have plagued the girls this season reemerged during the game.

BEA was a longer, taller team and they eventually came to dominate the boards in this game and got points off of second or third shot attempts.

BEA pressure began to force the Saints into turnovers. SJA had 19 turnovers and BEA had 11 turnovers for the game.

After a hot shooting start, the Saints went cold. For the game, SJA shot 22 percent from the floor. The girls scored only 12 points in the second half and there was a ten minute stretch in the second half where the team didn’t score at all.

Sophomore Morgan Sandmeyer broke that dry spell by knocking down a three with a little over a minute and a half left in the game.